Kickass Torrents Shut Down By Philippine Authorities, Torrent Site Quickly Moves To New Domain

Kickass Torrents, one of the largest torrent sites, was shut down by Philippine officials after they received complaints from the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry. While the domain seizure stopped the site briefly, multiple proxy sites were running as of Friday.

Kickass Torrents, operating under the domain kat.ph, was seized on Thursday, reports TorrentFreak. The torrent site is the second-largest such site behind The Pirate Bay. According to the dotPH, the domain registry of the Philippines, a temporary restraining order was filed against Kickass Torrents by the Philippine Intellectual Property Office. The order was meant to suspend the domain kat.ph for 72 hours.

The dotPH statement says the restraining order “was issued because of a complaint filed with the IPO by the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry and some of its members. The complaint alleges that the registrant of kat.ph is violating intellectual property rights by making copyrighted music available for download to its users.” DotPH had initially received a request to shut down the domain in December 2011, but the registry wanted a court order prior to taking any action. TorrentFreak suggests that the shutdown of Kickass Torrents may have had some help from the U.S. government as the site has garnered plenty of interest due to its popularity.

Despite the seizure of kat.ph, Kickass Torrents is alive and kicking elsewhere, having quickly jumped to a different domain. Visitors going to kickass.to will find a thriving Kickass Torrents. This is the second high-profile domain seizure in June; earlier in the month Movie2k was shut down. The streaming-movie portal was shut down after the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, successfully had Movie2k blocked by top UK Internet Service Providers. Much like Kickass Torrents, Movie2k quickly evolved, morphing to Movie4k and resuming services.